A comment on the New York City protests…

There was a major protest event in New York city earlier today. Thousands of protesters who want to “Occupy Wall Street” took over a large swath of the financial district, and then marched on the Brooklyn bridge, completely shutting it down. While the protesters were on the bridge, some were cordoned off by the NYPD and over 700 protesters (as of this post) were arrested.

There was NO mainstream media coverage of this event. There was absolutely no interruption of the pre-programmed Saturday night drivel on CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS, or NBC for a live news feed.

Twitter was also not trending the thousands of #occupywallstreet and #ows tags.

Yes, there were tweets from individuals on what was happening, but unless you followed certain feeds, or knew of the hashtags to search for, you would never know this event happened.

The protest isn’t what really concerns me. It’s the defining silence around it that has me wondering if something very important has been broken in our society.

Day-old news doesn’t carry the same impact as “live” news. Blogs and individual tweets still don’t reach the same number of people that a TV broadcast does. So is there such a thing as reliable mass media anymore? Is there a way to show what is happening in the world that can’t be censored or prejudiced with an individual’s point of view? And did Twitter censor the thousands and thousands of #occupywallstreet and #ows hashtags?

A good friend of mine tweeted me that nobody will care unless “someone important like Brad Pitt, Snookie or a Kardashian to be named later appears”. Maybe that’s the biggest problem.